It All Comes Down To Laundry

August 2, 2013 by David Rattiner

One of my biggest pet peeves in life is doing laundry. I don’t mind doing it, per se, I mind the fact that it uses up so much electricity. Ever since I was a kid, I enjoyed the act of doing laundry. That evolved into an actual need to do laundry. I can tell if a shirt has been worn just once. If it has, I feel this indescribable need to put it in the laundry basket and do a load.

As I’ve grown older, one of my favorite areas in which to spend my free time is the gym. But a big problem with the gym is that clothes acquire a certain odor after going just once. I’ll get on the treadmill or the bench or that devil’s machine known as the Stairmaster, work up a sweat, immediately get annoyed that my clothes are dirty, take a shower and head to work. I’ll leave the clothes in my car, which does not have an air-freshening effect, especially in the heat, and then I’ll go home and put them in the wash.

This year, however, I’ve noticed that a lot of the guys at the gym wear clothing by Under Armour, which has shirts and shorts made of a light material that is similar to a bathing suit. I recently bought a shirt from Nike made out of similar material, and last week I got an idea. What if I went to the gym in a bathing suit and this shirt, and then showered in my clothes after a workout? Would this work?

For three days straight, I wore a bathing suit and my Nike shirt, and at the end of my workout I took a shower, and washed my bathing suit and shirt in the shower as well. The material is light enough to air-dry if I squeeze out the water, and there’s a machine at the gym that’s designed for bathing suits that gets them dry.

I put my gym clothes back in my bag, then attempted to cleverly hang them inside my car with the window open. They would dry quickly in the sun, I reasoned, and they wouldn’t smell.

This entire operation worked flawlessly for three days, and I started to feel like I had discovered a new way to live (and save that electricity). The only problem was my socks, which I stuffed at the bottom of my bag. As far as I know, there are no socks out there made out of bathing suit material.

I remember when I used to work at the beach in the summertime and almost never wore a T-shirt. I basically lived in my bathing suit during the day and would shower off at the beach. It was very “off-the-gridish.” This little system I had at the gym brought me back to that, and I saw no real problem with it until I began to realize that there was no way I could account for the stinky gym socks, outside of throwing them in the garbage. I could not bear the idea of my gym socks, uncleansed, lingering in my car during the day. I attempted, on day three, to wear my gym socks as my work socks.

This is not recommended.

My dream in life, at the current moment, anyway, is for somebody to make a pair of shoes that you can wear to the gym that are not flip-flops, but are waterproof and can be worn without socks and can pass the “shoes are required” rule that all gyms have. Unless this happens, all of my efforts have been in vain.